For anybody interested in this topic, I recommend that you watch The Great Happiness Space (dir. Jake Clennell), a documentary about "host boys" in Osaka, Japan. The interesting thing Clennell points out is that much of the business these clubs get is from female sex workers who have a fair amount of money to spend, and when they do, they decide to spend it on the fantasies of "normal" or "ideal" relations woven by host boys. So, it isn't just a case of rich women playing around with boy toys. There is actually a far more complex, interesting, and quite depressing element to this particular economy.

You guys honestly need to see The Great Happiness Space. The hosts depicted in that documentary seem like incredibly charming, highly-skilled entertainers. They have to weigh every single thing they say as a calculation which either makes the client a return customer or a one-and-done fling. Not to mention the fact that they're often bouncing around between several clients at the same time, playing them off one another in order to get them to spend more money. It's not an incredibly moral job, in terms of how the hosts treat their sometimes pathetically deluded and attached customers (kind of like selling a drink to an alcoholic), but it's hard to say that these men--the ones who are successful at any rate--aren't skilled workers.

Also, again, it's not just rich professional women getting off with boy toys. Much of the sustenance of the male host industry in Japan is provided by female sex workers who either can't or don't care to find "ideal" relationships in their ordinary lives. It's kind of sad to hear the story of a female sex worker who makes loads of money, but is so desperate for that fantasy of an ideal relationship that she spends nearly all the money she makes living out this fantasy with male hosts on a weekly basis, honestly believing that it contains something real. Knowing this, it's hard to chalk up the male hosts as an example of role reversal, because in this case, you have money earned by female sex industry workers simply being funneled into the male sex industry, and as I understand, most of these guys are just banking the cash, not going back and spending it on female sex workers. Doesn't sound like such a great deal for women if you look at it that way, at least not economically speaking.

It seems that one could easily take or leave whatever is saved on Evernote. Participation doesn't imply that one must obsessively catalogue everything he or she comes in contact with. Will some people catalogue more obsessively than others? Sure. But the extent to which this is "healthy" or "unhealthy" is completely relative, and it seems like the technophobic responses don't take into account the fact that one mustn't dive in head first and become one of Neal Stephenson's "gargoyles" in order to use the service.

I think populism becomes a problem when it is based on a reactionary position, and entire groups/ideas are unfairly set in its crosshairs.

Also, I think we have a tendency to term certain types of protest "populist" while dismissing others as coming from the fringe, and therefore being less noteworthy. The Tea Party demonstrations, for example, pulled in a rather paltry number of protesters, considering how many overall demonstrations there were. Compare this to the worldwide anti-war/anti-globalization movement that ascended during the Bush administration and it doesn't look like much. Of course, the anti-war movement was consistently portrayed as a fringe movement, far too "ideological" for the mainstream to really handle. Yet the Tea Party movement is "populist," and therefore receives major news coverage and discussion in the "serious" political debate, even though it could be argued to have been far more "fringe" even than the anti-war movement.

Let us not forget, as well, that populist outrage is, generally speaking, just another tool for politicians to use. Most of the time, politicians and major media personalities are the ones who stoke this outrage, and they're also the ones who direct this outrage once it's reached a happy boil. Of course, the real danger of populism, in many cases, is that it gives the impression of being an "honest," "direct," "spontaneous" political response, when in fact it is as planned and engineered as the most cynical political scheme.

It's possible to wrongly pooh-pooh a protest with a "populist" message that happens to be sensible. And on the other hand, it's also possible to rightfully attack a "populist" movement as all outrage and bluster with no clear message. Unfortunately, I think it's become the case that most "populist" outcry is of the latter variety. It's stoked by the powerful, who feed the outrage with overly simplistic logic, relying on absolutes and archaic ideals as glue to hold it together. This was/is the entire populist outcry over immigration, in a nutshell. It's not that the anti-immigration people are wrong. It's that they refuse to see the world in anything other than absolutes, and instead believe that economic realities, to which we must adapt, can be overruled by traditional, patriotic ideals. Instead of arguing about how we will adapt to these realities (a discussion which can yield a wide variety of solutions), they propose that we throw everyone out, seal up the borders, and/or toss a bunch of people in jail.

Too often, populism is just the hammer of reactionary outrage, endlessly beating the square block into the round hole for anybody who will listen. And I think that's why it gets a bad rap, and why it deserves to get a bad rap.